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The UC system is also race-blind.

Correspondingly, you see 33% asian in UCs, and 43% asian at Caltech.




The UC system is legally required to be race-blind.

They aren't actually race-blind, and funnily enough they're happy to admit that in official documents. The recent study on "should we stop accepting SAT scores from applicants" specifically noted that, although black and hispanic applicants have much lower SAT scores than other applicants, the effect of ignoring SAT scores on black and hispanic admissions would be negative. Ultra-low SAT scores are a plus! If and only if you belong to a certain race.


>They aren't actually race-blind

Do you mean they take race into account when admitting an individual?

>Ultra-low SAT scores are a plus!

Do you have direct evidence of this? Just because black and hispanic applicants have lower SAT scores on average and they're harmed overall by ignoring SAT scores doesn't mean having a low SAT score is a plus. Black and hispanic applicants might have a much different distribution of SAT scores than other applicants.

>If and only if you belong to a certain race.

How does that work, are the admissions people factoring in race?


> Just because black and hispanic applicants have lower SAT scores on average and they're harmed overall by ignoring SAT scores doesn't mean having a low SAT score is a plus. Black and hispanic applicants might have a much different distribution of SAT scores than other applicants.

The distribution satisfying the following constraints:

- low SAT scores are bad for your application

- the average black SAT score is very low

- absence of SAT scores would result in a net loss in black admissions

looks like most blacks scoring above average (so that their applications are hurt by the loss of the score) and a few blacks scoring deeply negative numbers (to get the average down). You can't actually get a negative score on the SAT.

In reality, black and hispanic scores are roughly normally distributed, just like white scores, but substantially lower.


I just skimmed part of the report[1]. I don't see anything indicating "Ultra-low SAT scores are a plus!" There's nothing indicating that it's advantageous for an individual to get a lower score.

It does seem to show that black and hispanic students seem to have a lower admission standard for SAT scores. But I can come up with a couple hypotheses for why we might see this data even if the admission ignores race:

1) The admission might largely ignore SATs already. If that's the case, and if black and hispanic applicants have lower SATs, then it it would be expected that black and hispanic accepted students would also have lower SATs because nothing is really filtering out low SAT scores, they're just passed through unfiltered.

2) The admission might have a lower SAT standard for students from low income families. Black and hispanic students might be on average lower income, and thus on average be aided by the income-based standard policy, even though students' race is actually not taken into account.

[1] https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview...


This makes perfect sense. You would expect Asians to be a much higher percentage of UCB especially if it were truly race blind. For comparison, Stuyvesant High School (maybe the closest thing to a race-blind merit-based educational institution this country has) is 72.6% Asian.


In my experience, it is not race-blind (see above comment). Also, Professor Sander at UCLA is suing the UC system over alleged violations of Prop 209.

https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2018/11/19...


It isn’t quite race blind. It is race blind if you pass the initial bar. After that they take subjective things into account like your essay.


The well known hack for the essay is to emphasize how you grew up poor, disadvantaged, first in family to go to college, escaped war, etc... Apparently helpful both for college and medical school.




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